Abstract
This essay considers the relationship of the Jewish East End to liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liberalism is here understood both as a discourse and a set of practices concerned with governance. The idea that liberalism was intolerant of the Jews’ difference is an idea present in much recent writing by both historians and literary scholars. The essay subjects this idea to critical examination. Specifically, it considers the integration of Jews within practices of poor relief and education as well as the representation of Jews in the writing of social investigators such as Beatrice Potter. <small>(Image: Interior of a tailoring workshop in Christian Street in London’s East End, c. 1913. The image is part of the <a href="http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/jewish-britain-home">Jewish Museum’s online exhibition Jewish Britain: A History in 50 Objects</a>. Credit: © Jewish Museum London)</small>
Highlights
The East End of London resisted liberalism
The picture of the Jewish East End projected by contemporaries informed those scholars who, in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote pioneering social histories of Jewish immigrants and the Jewish community.[3]
From the 1990s Fishman’s was no longer a lone voice and others too reoriented their attention to the history of Jewish labour and the labour movement; the histories of Jewish crime and prostitution were acknowledged; and the social, cultural, and political conflicts between rich and poor, East End and West End, anglicized and foreign within the Jewish community often became the focus of attention.[4]
Summary
The East End of London resisted liberalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, East End constituencies were bastions of apathy and Conservatism, friendly to electoral candidates who advertised their imperial patriotism, support for protection from cheap foreign imports and vigorous opposition to Jewish immigration.
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